Well, all-woman anythings really. Shortlists are the famous example from the process of MP candidate-selection that really delivered, briefly, a more representative set of parliamentarians to the UK. But the reason I've been thinking about this again recently was my conversation with that outraged man who couldn't enter competitions for female composers.

I'm going to begin with a critique of his objections to this method of encouraging female talent, which were entirely typical of the genre and thus worth discussing in general terms that go beyond this particular instance. This will be the grumpy feminist bit. If you prefer, you can skip ahead to the more cheerful part later on where I discuss the very positive experiences this approach offers, which aren't necessarily apparent until you've participated in them.

Putting more than one song together to make a bigger structure is a standard part of the arranger’s craft. There are all kinds of interesting things to think about the how you join the songs together, but today my interest is on the more fundamental level of how you choose them.

I think about medleys in two types. One is a collection of tunes that share a common origin or set of associations. Say, selections from a show, or songs by (or made famous by) a particular artist or group, such as my Madonna Medley or Meatloaf Medley. I tend to think of these as show pieces, useful as they offer a longer span of musical time without a break than single songs would, in much the same way that classical concert programming places more substantial works as focal points amongst the shorter items.

Joanna Russ, whose detailed analysis of critical strategies that thwart female artists I have had reason to cite before, makes an observation about the constitution of anthologies and curricula in the study of English literature. Quite reliably, about 5% of the writers represented will be female. It won’t always be the same women listed, as different editors bring different interests to the task, or focus on different nationalities or time-periods, but the proportion is remarkably stable.

You can check this if you like. After all, Russ was writing back in 1983, surely things have got better now? I did with The Oxford Book of English Verse, published in 1999, and it is up to about 6%, so that gives you a measure of historical progress. Ahem.

Anyway, I have been aware of this form of tokenism for some years, but have only recently started getting an insight into how it works, thanks to the work of people like Daniel Kahneman and Rolf Dobelli, who have done such sterling work in diagnosing habitual errors of thinking.

My current and most recently-filled Thinking BooksIt is the time of year for surveying past and future in the manner of Janus. About whom I realise I know absolutely nothing except that he inspired the name of the first month of the year by his capacity to look forwards and backwards at once. I expect he was good at three-point turns. (Though now I think about it, he must have found the introduction of car-seat head-rests to prevent whiplash both inconvenient and uncomfortable.)

Anyway, do you realise it’s just over eight years since I started this blog? That sounds like a significant chunk of time to me. Part of me is surprised to find I’m still going with no signs of letting up, but then again, I have found it an excellent form. I look back to my early twenties and see that even then, what I needed was a genre of short-form writing that is both intelligent and informal. And for six years before I started blogging, I was journaling regularly in what I have always referred to as my ‘Thinking Book’. Many of the early posts came straight out of those early-morning jottings.

One of the things I find difficult to get my head round these fractious political days is how people can take offence at being wished 'Happy Holidays'. It seems a cheerful and emotionally uncomplicated message, which has needlessly acquired uncheerful and contentious baggage. Merry Christmas is another pleasant greeting, as is Happy Hanukkah. If people are worried about not mentioning which religious festival they're celebrating, why is Season's Greetings not equally suspect? It all seems so strange and arbitrary.

Living in a culturally varied city, as I do, I enjoy opportunities for mutual goodwill at various points throughout the year: Diwali, Eid, Chinese New Year are all focus of public celebration.

The Dilts hierarchy as analytical tool (plus some other stuff behind it...)Saturday took me down to Bristol to spend some time with music team members from Bristol A Cappella. Our primary focus was goal-setting: working from values and aspirations through to concrete plans. I’m not going to write much about the detail, except to say that both the adventures they are embarking on and the challenges they are grappling with would elicit empathy from anyone who has been involved in a choral ensemble.

But there are a couple of points that I can usefully reflect on without disclosing private conversations. First is how the Dilts pyramid emerged as an analytical device for considering activities within both the music team and the wider chorus. We had compiled a collection of ideas about what the ideal chorus of the imagination would be doing that the real-life currently chorus isn’t.

In my previous post on ‘old barbershop’ (I am keeping the inverted commas as the term doesn’t get more self-evident with use), I talked a bit about lyrics, but mostly about specific technical features of the arrangements in core repertoire 20 years ago compared to now. The third area that came up in the conversation that sparked these posts was a framed as a general issue, but in the context of a particular song. There are threads to be untangled here.

So, the general issue was choreography, or possibly body language. There are patterns of inhabiting the body that are inherently linked to how we understand a style, indeed are part of the way we store it. This comes out both in explicitly-planned moves, but also in the general performance demeanour.

Some time in the early part of the millennium, around when I was writing my first book, my then boss asked me what were the new and happening things in the world of barbershop. The question entertained me, as I had been in the midst of documenting the ways in which the genre has been built on an aesthetic of nostalgia. The slogan ‘Keep it Barbershop’ (and the identity label derived from it: KIBBERs), which was still in some currency at that time, was about the resolute resistance to innovation.

It is hard to put your finger on exactly the moment it changed (Michigan Jake? Team OC Times + Aaron Dale? Westminster Chorus?), but the last decade and a half has seen not only a good deal of innovation, but also a cultural shift to a world in which the new is greeted with excitement. The seeds were planted in the early 1990s with changes to the judging system that allowed a greater range of repertoire and arranging techniques, but it has taken nigh on a quarter-century to change people’s felt experience in relation to the defined boundaries. Back in 2005, when I wrote my article on ‘Cool Charts or Barbertrash?’, this was still a very active area of contention.